STRANGELAND.NET

I’m sure everyone at this point has seen all the coverage regarding the protests by Hispanics around the country against the effects to stem the tide of illegal immigration. In all of this, you have the media refusing to call a duck a duck. Everywhere you are seeing the term undocumented worker. There is also a large call for immigrant rights in regards to these undocumented workers. I’m going to take a bit of time here to try and clear the fog of euphemism surrounding all of this and try to put things in a bit of a starker light.

Let’s start with the term undocumented worker in our little discussion today. The people in question are undocumented in the sense that they do not have legal Social Security Cards. I freely admit that in a technical sense, this is true. However, it obfuscates the actual base matter here. Each of these undocumented workers is undocumented because of the very simple fact that they are in this country illegally. In some way or another, they came into the country without going through the legally mandated immigration system in clear violation of United States law. For their own reasons, the media and proponents of immigrant rights don’t want to refer to them at illegal immigrants. After all if you refer to them as illegal immigrants, then your admitting that they’re doing something wrong. In admitting that they’re doing something wrong, you’re then casting the question out in front of everyone of why they should be allowed any rights or privileges within this country when they’re here in clear violation of the laws of this country. So if you give them the term of undocumented workers, you’re setting them up to be something less troubling. After all, you simply need to get them some documentation to make everything okay, right? Get them just a few pesky little documents, and you’re back on the main path and ready to run. If you actually call them illegal immigrants (or the even less PC term: illegal alien), then you’re in a stickier situation. If someone is doing something illegal, then they should be prosecuted and have the force of law brought against them. That is what this country was founded on, yes? The Rule of Law? Unfortunate, I can almost see the blank stare that I’d get bringing up that point in a random room.

So in the last week, we’ve had massive protests in cities around the country, from Los Angeles, California, to Smithfield, North Carolina. You’ve had massive crowds of Hispanics and their supporters marching through the streets waving Mexican flags and claiming that they have just as much right to be here as anyone else. I freely admit in a number of those cases, they probably do given the simple fact that they entered the country through the legally established channels for immigrating. For many of them, however, this is not the case. They came across the border in some fashion that eluded detection by the Border Patrol and are now here without the sanction of the United States government (but the full support of the Mexican government). Now their supporters are clamoring for these illegal immigrants to be given their rights. I hate to break it to them, then, but their rights are nowhere near as expansive as they and their supporters want people to believe. They want to be given the rights of full citizens of this country. They want to be able to vote, to legally take advantage of public education, public welfare, and other tax supported services. Every time I hear this, I come back to a rather simple argument: they’re not here legally, therefore they do not get access to those services and privileges. Period. End of story. I understand there are those that feel differently and feel that the laws limiting immigration should be lifted or heavily modified. Great! Talk to your Representatives and Senators and get them to push through the changes. Until that point, however, it remains illegal and the legality of the situation should be enforced.

At the end of the day, I have no issues with immigration. Those who come to this country legally, I gladly welcome to this country and appreciate their contributions. Those who come here illegally and leach off the system are a different story. Marching in the streets and claiming that they have a justified claim to rights in this country does not change the truth of the matter. If they sneak into the country, they’re here in clear violation of the law. They’ve come into this country and they’re opting to do so on the shady side of the tracks, therefore they should accept that they will not have access to things that legal immigrants or natural born citizens do, and they should fully expect to be sent home or otherwise punished when they’re caught. To think otherwise is pollyanna-ish daydreaming at best and idiotic hubris at worst. Simply because they get outraged that people want the laws enforced and the border secured doesn’t change the fact that they’re in the wrong.

Yes, I understand and agree that the above doesn’t even begin addressing the economic implications of rounding up all illegal immigrants in the country and sending them back from whence they came. My intent here was to sweep away some of the euphemistic obfuscation on the situation before proceeding further down the path. This is an issue that will become a flashpoint over the coming months, especially as we head into the Mid-Term elections. You have the Democrats that are historically tied to minority rights and you have the Republicans that are trumpeting the Border Security call as part of the War on Terror. Therefore, I’m sure that I’ll be speaking on this again in the future. Just simply don’t expect me to use the term undocumented worker or claim that they have a substantive basis to their claim for immigrant rights.

stranger Uncategorized

Once upon a time there was an Islamic charity called Al Haramain. They were a religiously based aid organization that promoted the Wahhabi form of Islam around the world while also providing aid to the less fortunate. Unfortunately for the charity organization two captured terrorism suspects claimed to have worked or volunteered for the organization in the past, Shaker Aamer and Muhammas Assad. On this information the US accused Al Haramain of having terrorist ties and froze all their finances. The government dropped the case against Al Haramain recently when the organization folded under the economic pressure.

That would seem to be the end of the story, but actually it is just the beginning, because during the initial discovery phase of the trial US Officials accidentally delivered transcripts of phone calls between the Al Haramain officials and their lawyers in the US. Not the redacted and heavily edited version of the transcripts that would usually be given in national security cases, but the pristine and unadulterated version of those transcripts.

In a bit drama that might seem to come straight from a John Grisham novel, the FBI demanded the transcripts back from the Al Haramain lawyers. When they discovered that the transcripts were being held in an evidence room at the Portland, OR courthouse the FBI went down there demanding the papers, which they were denied. Some reports say that the bailiffs at the courthouse were physically barring the FBI agents, hands on weapons, denying them access to the transcripts. Because the FBI was a plaintiff in the case against Al Haramain and gave the documents over as part of discovery they have no legal right to take the documents away from the defendants.

After reading the transcripts the lawyers have filed suit against the government claiming to have been eavesdropped upon, breaching attorney client privilege, and doing all of that without a warrant. And there are few if any judges in the US who would approve a warrant to allow the authorities to eavesdrop on the conversation of a defendant and that defendant’s lawyer, something about attorney-client privilege. But right now the transcripts are sealed and sit under lock and key in the vaults of the US Attorneys office in Seattle, WA… not in Portland, because there is nobody legally competent there to hold a top-secret document that is not also a plaintiff in the case.

This is not yet the end of the story though, there is yet another layer. The lawyer that was retained by the lawyers of Al Haramain to handle the eavesdropping case, Thomas Nelson, is accusing the FBI of performing “sneak-and-peek” searches of his law offices and home. Over a period of nine months a strange man was seen accompanying the cleaning crew in the law offices of Thomas Nelson; one time walking around the office carrying a vacuum and examining the offices without actually doing any vacuuming, another time caught on closed circuit television trying to jimmy the lock to Nelson’s personal office. At their home, Nelson’s family noticed that their alarm system had begun malfunctioning, not going off when a door was open or not activating, and the alarm company was never able to find a fault with the system.

So what does this all mean? Well first it means that the FBI in Portland is deserving of the Keystone Cop award for bungling nearly every aspect of this issue. Giving away the evidence of illegal wiretaps and being caught on camera trying to pick the lock of a law office is all pretty inept. Second it means that there is concrete evidence of unwarranted wiretapping sitting in a vault in Seattle. It is not just rumor that it may have happened, it is real and it is in black & white. There have been all kinds of speculation about why the Bush administration may have not wanted to approach the FISA court for wiretapping warrants. Now we have a case where there is proof it has happened, and we even can understand why the administration didn’t request a warrant. They would have been laughed out of the FISA court trying to justify the need for listening in on legally privileged communications. If the case against Al Haramain had not been dropped those transcripts could have given the prosecutor an unfair advantage over the defense, as they would have information on the details of the defenses strategy and be able to preemptively counter that strategy. Such an advantage is an anathema to US jurisprudence, which goes out of its way to level the field between the prosecutor and the defendant.

But bending the rules till they break, bucking two hundred years of legal precedent, and claiming detachment from judicial oversight is nothing new for this administration. The only question we need to be asking ourselves is, are we willing to accept that the government may eavesdrop on confidential legal communication? Do you want a third party getting access to your confidential information for unknown purposes? I know that I do not, not because I am engaging in anything illegal, but because I expect to be able to retain some shreds of privacy.

code_archaeologist Uncategorized

I just finished watching “V for Vendetta” and I was struck by a thought. People in our country today no longer know how to take action against a Government that has spiraled out of their control. We have lost our ability to carry out a dialogue with the state; we have given up our voice out of fear of the social consequences of our words. We fear being labeled “un-American”, “terrorist-supporters”, “jihadist-lovers”, and “troop-haters”. And with that fear we are cowed into complicit silence as we watch our nation slowly spiral out of our control.

But those labels are just nonsensical pejoratives, and the people who use them expect that they will silence any meaningful opposition. They are used to isolate conflicting views from the mainstream; they are used to limit the dialogue to acceptable and invisible zones of speech. These nonsensical pejoratives have shaped the new language of political correctness. Except unlike that misguided movement of past decades, which sought that no person should ever feel offended by the words that they heard; this new political correctness seeks to ensure that the power of government should never be offended by what the people say.

Submissiveness to the will of the state though is not the way that this country was created. In 1776, John Hancock’s gigantic signature on the Declaration of Independence was a huge single finger salute to the state of their origin. Every man who put his name on that piece of paper signed his own death warrant if caught. Each one of them committed treason against the state on that fateful day because they could not stand the path that their Mother Country had taken and they could not idly take the abuse delivered upon their fellow colonists any longer.

There are many in our country that feel that the nation is spiraling out of control. And what do they do? They get permits to stand passively like cattle in obscure “free speech zones”. They sit around and sing folk songs, camp out on the side of roads, and hold candle vigils, they hold up signs protesting anything and everything under the sun instead of pointing an accusatory finger at the creeping fascist elephant in the room. Yet they do nothing that forces the state to listen to them, because they fear the consequences. They fear being arrested or being labeled with a nonsensical pejorative… and they sit there with everybody else in complicit silence.

code_archaeologist Uncategorized